Tradition and individual Telent

Name :- Rathod Zindagi V.

Roll : 13

Part :- I Sem. II

Paper:- E-C-201: The Romantic Literature

Topic:-   Tradition and individual Telent

Submitted To,  Dr. Dilip Barad

                         Dept. of English

                          Bhavnagar University

                           Bhavnagar

Tradition and individual Telent

                            “Tradition and I individual Talent “

                                                               T.S.Eliot

Introduction:-

                          T.S.Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent” was published in 1919 in The Egoist – The Time Literary supplement. This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of 20^th century. The essay is divided into three main sections: the first gives us Eliot’s concept of tradition; the second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry. The third part the concludes the debates by saying that impersonality of poetry are complementary things.

                     Eliot asserts that the world ‘tradition’ is not a very favorable term with the English who generally utilize the same as a term of censure. Tradition does not imply a blind adherence to the literary tradition of the past tradition. This would amount to mere copying or slavish continuous literary tradition. For Eliot, tradition has a three -fold significance. Firstly, tradition can not be inherited and involves a great deal of labour and erudition. Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves oppreption not only of the pastness of the past, But also of its presence. Thirdly the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature form Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continous literary tradition. 

Part- I of the essay:-

                                    In the first part he majorly talked about three things

J In English criticism “Tradition” is used as a phrase of censure.

J Criticism is indispensable creative active.                                                        

J The importance of Tradition to Individual Talent.

                   

              To him knowledge of tradition plays vital role in the development of personal talent. He writes 

                            “Tradition is a matter of  much

                              wider significance. It can not be

                              inherited and if  you want  it

                              you  must  obtain it by great

                              labour it involves the historical sense”

   

                                This means: - The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past , but of its presence. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the  literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.

The close relationship and interdependent of the past and the present :-

                                      Eliot gives importance to the interdependence of past and the present. He finds not contradictory but supplementary elements in the co-relationship of the past and the present. HE expresses his views as follows:-

                        “No poet, no artist  of  my  art

                         has  his   complete  meaning ,

                         alone.  His   significance,  his

                         appreciation  of  his  relation

                         to  the  dead  poets  and   

                        artist.  You  can  not  value 

                        him alone ; you must set him

                        for contrast and comparison

                        among the dead.  I  mean

                        this  as  a  principal  of

                        aesthetic not merely historical

                        Criticism ”          

                       

      The relationship of a poet’s work to the great works of the past :-

            

                                   Eliot is of the view that the present work of art should not be judged by the standards of the past. The present work may or may not conform to the standards of the past , but it should not decide whether the work of art is good or bad. Eliot explains it an in a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. It is a judgment a comparison in which two thing are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value a test, it is true. Which can only be slowly and cautiously applied. For we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform and is perhaps individual or it appears individual and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that is one and not the other.      

Literature as continuity:-

                                               To be traditional in Eliot sense means to be conscious of the main current of art and poetry. The poem must be very conscious of the main  current , which not all flow invariabily through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He writes:-

                   

                               “The difference between the present

                                 and the past is that the                   

                                 conscious present is an awareness

                                 of the past in a way and to

                                an extent which the past’s

                                awareness of it self can not show”

Part-II of eassy:-

                               He starts the second part of his eassy with:-

                              “honest criticism and sensitive

                                is directed not upon the

                                poet but upon the poetry”

            

                      The artist or the poet adopts the process of depersonalization which is a continual surrender of him self as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice a continual extinction of personality. There still remain to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to sense of tradition.

                          Eliot explain this by comparing it to a chemical process. The mind of poet is the shred of platinum. The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates , more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passion which are its material.

                        The elements of the experience of the poet are too kinds-emotions and feelings. They are the elements which entering the presence of poet’s mind and acting as a catalyst go to the making of a work of art may be formed out of several emotions into one. It may be formed out of a single emotions or out of feelings invoked in poet by various words and images. Thus the poet’s mind is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

                       Eliot explain his theory of depersonalization more elaborately. He elaborates his idea by saying that the emotions and experiences of the artist. He writes : If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry. You see how great is the variety of types of combination and how completely any semi-ethical criterion of sublimity misses the mark. The poet has not a personality to express but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

 It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple or crude or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life, one error, in fact   of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotion to express, and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers  the perverse. The business of the pot is not find new emotions, but to use the  emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that emotion recollected in tranquility is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion nor recollection nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration and a new thing resulting from the concentration of very great number of  experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a  concentration which does not happen consciously or deliberation.

Part III of the essay:-

                                       In the last section of the essay, Eliot says that the poets sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things. Eliot writes:

                                    “TO divert interest from the poet to the poetry

                                    is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster                                                                                                    estimation of actual poetry, good and bad”          

CONCLUSION:- Finally he ended his essay  with “ very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not on the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal and the poet cannot reach this impersonality without  surrendering himself wholly the work of to be done and he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is now merely the present, but the present movement of the past unless he is conscious not of what is bad but of what is already living.